Computer programs and applications (“applications”) generate a large amount of information and data. In organizations (e.g., private and public sector entities such as corporations, not-for-profit groups, government and other regulatory entities, or other groups of individuals organized to perform a set of related tasks or functions), large amounts of data are created, modified, deleted, saved, or retrieved, which becomes difficult to manage and analyze in order to perform functions related to specific types of data. Organizations in retail, commercial, office, industrial, medical, legal, and other industries generate large amounts of data. In order to manage this data, conventional enterprise and other large-scale applications such as document management systems were developed to help organize this data. However, conventional applications are problematic.
Conventional applications for organizing large amounts of data often rely upon a structured data storage schema (e.g., SQL, MySQL, Oracle, and others) that use overlying document management applications to organize and search through large amounts of data. Other conventional applications that organize unstructured data often rely upon indexing or require large amounts of storage and processing resources, which is expensive and time-consuming to implement and manage. Further, conventional applications for structured or unstructured data analysis and organization fail to provide data in any type of format that is useful or efficient. For example, if a corporate legal department is aggregating data and information related to a specific matter, conventional applications would search structured data based on a data storage schema (e.g., SQL, MySQL, Oracle, DB2, and others) and unstructured data relying on either indexing of the unstructured data or parsing of text associated with the unstructured data, which is time-consuming, processor-intensive, and inaccurate. Moreover, existing efforts to organize electronic data are based on manual or semi-manual efforts to tag or otherwise organize such data, which requires significant user intervention. Such user intervention is not only time consuming, but also susceptible to human error. Further, manual tagging (i.e., manually adding metadata) is difficult to enforce with respect to data management policies or parameters. Consequently, data found in response to search using conventional applications is difficult to use, poorly organized, and inefficiently presented (i.e., displayed on a user interface), which leads to additional time and labor being expended to sift through large amounts of data.
Thus, what is needed is a solution for organizing and managing data.